China Scrambles As U.S Israeli Strike On Iran Upends Xi’s Middle East Strategy

By: Zineb Riboua | National Review

The men in Zhongnanhai do not rattle easily. Decades of patient statecraft, a foreign policy built on studied ambiguity, and an economy engineered to absorb external shocks have granted Beijing’s leadership a remarkable tolerance for turbulence. Operation Epic Fury, the U.S.–Israeli military campaign now dismantling Iran’s military architecture, has produced something unusual in the corridors of Chinese power: visible confusion.

Xi Jinping is scrambling — and that word is not used lightly. For a leader who has built his image on strategic composure and long-horizon thinking, Xi faces an acutely dangerous moment — not because China faces a direct military threat but because every available response to the crisis in the Persian Gulf leads Beijing into a trap of its own contradictions.

There are three reasons why these strikes have created big problems for China. First, the Iranian counterweight is gone. In 2021, Xi told senior party officials that “the East is rising and the West is declining,” that America was “the biggest source of chaos in the present-day world,” and that China was entering a period of strategic opportunity. Iran was central to that thesis. Beijing needed a defiant Tehran to keep Washington pinned down in the Gulf, to sustain a sanctions-proof energy corridor, and above all, to stand as living evidence that American power had hard limits. The entire architecture of the CCP’s dogma of inevitability rested on Iran’s ability to endure, and Epic Fury removed the foundation in a single afternoon.

Ayatollah Khamenei was the man who made that thesis feel real. Beijing’s relationship with the Islamic Republic was never really ideological, but Khamenei’s survival was the single most useful fact in Chinese foreign policy. Here was a man whom Washington had threatened, sanctioned, plotted against, and encircled for over four decades, and yet he was still giving Friday sermons. Xi personally signed the comprehensive strategic partnership with Khamenei’s government. He personally authorized the weapons transfers. And he personally wielded the U.N. Security Council veto. None of it kept Khamenei alive for one additional hour once Washington decided he was finished.

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